This blog began in 2007, focusing on anthrax vaccine, and later expanded to other public health and political issues. The blog links to media reports, medical literature, official documents and other materials.

Tuesday, April 2, 2019

If I asked you whether you were for
or against pharmaceutical drugs, you would think my question absurd. Obviously, each drug is different and should
be judged on its own merits; furthermore, the usefulness of a drug depends on
the specific needs of the person to whom it is given. Yet we have become accustomed to thinking
about the vaccine issue in terms of being pro or con the entire class of vaccines.

Most parents who do not fully vaccinate
their children are not "against" vaccination. The media have
incorrectly framed the debate this way, for a reason. The for--or--against meme is very powerful propaganda,
designed to suggest that this issue is black and white, which it most assuredly
is not.It is further designed to create
a picture in people's minds that those "against" vaccine mandates are
anti-science, uneducated 'deplorables' (and who wants to be in that camp?)
while those "for" vaccinations and mandates are the educated, pro-science, savvy people.

Parents have a legal right to opt
out of vaccines using religious or philosophical exemptions in 47 US states.I wasn't choosy when my kids were small, but
today I certainly would be, if only because the benefits and risks are different for each vaccine.

Why does this author claim authority?

I strongly support vaccinations,
and everyone's right to vaccinate with any licensed vaccine they choose. But I know a lot about how vaccines are made,
and the serious adverse effects they can cause.I am an expert on the anthrax vaccine, and have provided expert
testimony on this vaccine to several congressional committees, the National Academy of
Sciences, the Canadian military courts (which led to ending its use in Canada)
and a British tribunal.And I, through my
patients' bitter experiences, learned it is critical to retain the right to
choose your vaccines.

Choice leads to better vaccines

The fact is, every vaccine is made
very differently from every other. Just like drugs, no vaccine is "100%
safe," and some are not very effective. You will lower your family's risk
of an adverse effect by choosing only those vaccines that provide high
value:needed benefit and relatively low
risk. This is of course what doctors are
expected to do when they prescribe drugs.

When vaccines are mandated, there
is no incentive for their manufacturers to improve them.Sometimes, vaccine effectiveness becomes less
over time.The whole-cell
pertussis vaccine was replaced by the current acellular pertussis vaccine in
1997 both because its effectiveness had lessened, and because it caused a
high rate of adverse events. Had consumers
not been refusing it, there might have been no switch to an acellular vaccine. Now, we need a more effective
pertussis vaccine, but with a guaranteed market for existing vaccines, industry
has been slow to respond.

We rely on the FDA to assure that
vaccines are relatively safe and effective.The FDA relies on the results of clinical trials and other tests.Testing before licensure is entirely paid for and/or conducted by the manufacturer, and
all data are owned and supplied by the manufacturer. FDA approves vaccines and then
crafts a label in conjunction with the manufacturer, describing the safety and
efficacy of the vaccine based only on manufacturer data.

Do the data become public after licensing a vaccine or drug?For vaccines, as much else in life,
the devil is in the details. And public access to those details (especially
regarding safety) is very limited. Twenty years ago, when Congress was
examining the safety of vaccines, CDC answered my Freedom of Information Act requests for data
on their own anthrax vaccine studies. But for the past ten years they have only
provided excuses and stonewalling.

The book Vaccine Whistleblower tells Dr. William Thompson's story of how CDC employees, including himself,
were made to put unwanted data in a garbage can and rework their analyses until
a strong statistical association between black males who received an early MMR and becoming autistic just--disappeared.Then CDC published
this doctored paper.

Heplisav is only the latest example of 'license first, get the answers later'--at FDA.Agency malfeasance

The fact is, information on the safety of
vaccines is being withheld from the American people by their own government. The only explanation is that the leaders at FDA and CDC have been captured by industry, along with a massive agency-industry revolving door. That adverse event information for licensed vaccines,
drugs and medical devices, collected or generated by federal health agencies--as in
this recent
FDA scandal -- gets hidden, destroyed or does not even exist should be a
compelling concern of everyone.

After swimming with dolphins at Key Largo, they checked me out at the edge of the pool

Visiting a Bhutanese Dzong, the regional seat of both government and religion (and a fort for good measure)

Why am I blogging?

Because life is meant to be lived! The left side of this blog has photos of some peak experiences. And the right side contains information about which I am passionate.

Too many peoples' lives are characterized by lack of authenticity, and fear of acknowledging and expressing their true nature. Employees cannot say what they think at work, and in the corporate system we must squish ourselves into square holes when we are round pegs. We thus lose touch with our souls, becoming cogs in a soulless, profit-driven machine.

The culture of political correctness has meant, in medicine, that we ignore how the foundations of our science are being undermined by commercialism. Clinical data generated or presented by the manufacturers of drugs, vaccines and devices cannot be trusted: there are hundreds of studies proving this. But this fraudulent information continues to be the only data informing the approval of vaccines, drugs and devices.

Unless scrupulous ethical conduct is demanded of physicians and biological scientists, our lack of meaningful standards will carry the medical-pharmaceutical system down the path of increasing irrelevance.

Medicine and its tools need to be affordable. The current medical-industrial milieu, characterized by contempt for science, countless ways for insiders to achieve wealth due to failure of good governance, and regulatory agency-to-industry revolving doors, has ushered in stratospheric pricing... further kicking us down that path to irrelevance.

Why is our new health care plan a giveaway to health industries instead of to health consumers? Why won't it cover all Americans? Why was the "public option" never an option for the Obama administration? Why did the promised Trump health plan evaporate the moment he was elected?

So many of our leaders carry a heavy burden of mendacity and avarice. If they instead got in touch with their own souls (perhaps by exposure to the natural world), or made their decisions by maximizing the amount of good that results, our leaders might find real meaning and value in their lives.

Until that happens, the only way to straighten out the current mess is to demand accountability and impose penalties on unethical/dishonest leaders. Both political parties enjoy bounteous hors d'oeuvres from Pharma's table, making it unlikely the existing political "process" will provide relief--as we've seen in the demoralizing healthcare reform drama.

Until then, I'll continue to "call it as I see it" in this blog -- working and living the way life should be, in rural Maine, far from the centers of power.

Ellen Byrne has created several designs encapsulating aspects of the FBI's ridiculous case against Bruce Ivins. They can be purchased on T-shirts and coffee mugs. All proceeds will be donated to the the Frederick County chapter of the American Red Cross, a favored charity of Dr. Bruce Ivins.